Who is the Cat that Curiosity Killed?

A few weeks ago I delivered a commencement address at the University of Portsmouth in England. I was forced to ask myself what wisdom I bad to impart to graduates and their families. I would like to tell you what I said, and see if any of you think this, or something like it might be worth repeating to other young people, perhaps in our lower level classes.

Speakers at university graduations give all kinds of advice. Where do they come up with it? Often they borrow from others and come up with something like, “Always do right.” This bit came from Mark Twain, who went on to explain that by following this advice you, “Will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

Or, I once heard the advice, “Make yourself necessary to somebody.” This came from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Now I have nothing against such advice — coming as it has from two individuals who have made such lasting contributions to the world’s culture. But is their advice practical? Is it memorable? Is it the one thing you’d like to say to new graduates, their families and friends?

I decided to take that opportunity to leave these new graduates with one piece of advice, and, as a specialist in the area of memory, with a way of remembering that advice. You’ll see that it’s advice about a cat. Not just any cat, but a particular cat — the cat that curiosity killed. I’ll come back to the curiosity cat, but first, how did I get to that advice to begin with?

I began my studies at the University of California-Los Angeles in the 1960s — a period of unrest and turbulence. I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. It was about the same time that one of our modern American heroes, John Glenn Jr., made being an astronaut seem like a good career. He had just orbited three times around the earth, traveling about 81,000 miles in five hours, before he splashed into the Atlantic Ocean. He was the first American to make such a flight. He made being an astronaut seem like fun but there didn’t seem to be any girl astronauts, so maybe that wasn’t for me. I considered the possibility of becoming a mathematics teacher, and briefly flirted with the idea of being a private detective or a stock broker.

And then I discovered psychology. It happened in an introductory psychology course, after which I gobbled up all the psychology that I could. Even after that, I still wasn’t quite sure what I would do with all that psychology. In fact, I left university, to go into a world still full of unknowns, and headed north to graduate school. My brother David drove me 400 miles to Stanford. When he dropped me off, I started sobbing — it was the first time that I would be living away from home and I was scared to death. At the same time, there was brewing excitement-all I knew for sure was that I was going to study more psychology.

When I think back to those years, it is clear to me that one of the biggest impacts on my life revolved around my growing understanding of science-or, in my case, (and the case of many of you here) psychological science. From my professors, textbooks, and study groups with fellow students, I learned that science is not just a huge bowl of facts to remember.

Science is a way of thinking. It’s a process. In an article in a recent issue of the New Yorker that I read on the plane to England, one writer put it even more aptly: Science is based on a fundamental insight- that the degree to which an idea seems true has nothing to do with whether it is true, and the way to distinguish factual ideas from false ones is to test them by experiment.

Well, I learned rather well how to test ideas through experimentation and apply that knowledge to one particular subject — human memory. Over the years I’ve conducted hundreds of experiments, and learned some pretty nifty things about the workings of the human mind. I won’t go into the details, except to say that discovering some fundamental facts about the malleability of memory bas been a most exciting thing to do.

But the study of psychology also gave me a way of thinking about the ideas of other people. About 20 years ago, when the psychology books were telling us that memory is permanent, that once something is seen or heard and goes into memory, it stays there forever, I wondered, “How do they know that?

What’s their evidence?” And I dug up the so-called evidence and investigated it as thoroughly as I could. I discovered it wasn’t evidence at all.

You don’t need to be a practicing psychological scientist to pick up some of these skills. Whether you go on to become

• a police officer or a private investigator.
• a therapist or a teacher.
• a playwright or a physicist,
• a geologist or a geographer,
• a software engineer or a statistician.

It’s possible to make use of one important gift that the study of psychological science has given to many of us. That is the gift of knowing how to ask the right questions about any claim that someone might try to foist upon you.

The first important question, in my mind, is four words long: “What is the evidence?”

When someone tries to tell you that: your astrological sign determines your personality … or that aliens are arriving in UFO’s and abducting people … or that coffee is bad for you … or that satanic ritual abuse is rampant. .. or that tenure is bad for the university. It should be almost automatic to ask, “What’s the evidence?” Now, in using these particular examples, I’m not trying to suggest that they are all examples of what the Evolutionary Biologist Richard Dawkins has called “pernicious rubbish on an almost astrological scale.” I’m only suggesting that it should be almost automatic to ask about any idea, “What’s the evidence?”

Now, as psychologists we don’t stop there. We can get even more specific about what we ask next:

• What kind of study was done?
• What was the dependent variable?
• Was there a control group?
• What kinds of statistical tests were used to analyze the data?
• Has the study been replicated?
• What we’ re really asking here is Question Number 2: “What EXACTLY is the evidence?”

Some evidence is so flimsy or fragile that it is not really evidence at all. For example, as I and others have shown, some kinds of eyewitness testimony is so fraught with the probability of error that it is not really evidence’ at all, and to consider it so can sometimes lead to grave miscarriages of justice.

So these questions about evidence are valuable to be asking over and over in life.

There is a wonderful cartoon that appeared recently in Parade Magazine. And here’s where we get to that cat. Picture this: mother and little son are sitting at the kitchen table. Apparently mom has just chided son for his excessive curiosity. The boy rises up and barks back, “Curiosity killed what cat? What was it curious about? What color was it? Did it have a name? How old was it?”

I particularly like that last question … maybe the cat was very old, and died of old age, and curiosity had nothing to do with it at all.

So in closing the commencement address in England, I reminded graduates that speakers at university graduations give advice freely:

• Go forth.
• Always do right.
• Be true to yourself.
• Make yourself necessary to somebody.
• Wear sunscreen.

It’s all good advice, but my pick for the one advice morsel is simple: remember to ask the questions that good psychological scientists have learned to ask. “What’ s the evidence?” and then, “What EXACTLY is the evidence?” And if you forget these questions, then just try asking for the name or the age of the cat that curiosity killed.